13. What Is Progress in Meditation

There’s a lot that can be said about what it means to make progress in meditation practice. In some traditions, the notion of progress can be made to seem fairly paradoxical. But there are actually a few landmarks on the path that are valid to consider as indications of whether you’re getting the intended benefit from this practice. And whether you’re recognizing important features of your own mind that are there to be recognized. The first and most basic is whether you’re able to make a regular habit of doing the practice. And that can be hard to do. And one of the purposes of an app like this is to make it easier to do, still, you really do just have to decide to do it. And when you go too many days without following through on that decision, you have to decide to do it all over again. Of course, any positive habit is like this. Working out, changing your diet, prioritizing time with your kids, it can be very easy to let important things fall by the wayside, as you know. And then you just have to recommit all over again. So just taking some period each day to practice is already significant progress. Most people never do such a thing in their lives. The second landmark worth noticing is that mindfulness eventually becomes an antidote to your psychological suffering. It’s not that negative emotions and moods no longer arise. But when they do, you can drop back and merely witness them. You can’t always do it, perhaps, but you can sometimes do it. And then you can do it more and more. What begins to happen is your own psychological suffering becomes a kind of mindfulness alarm, which reminds you to pay attention. And when you pay attention, it actually helps. That’s the sign that your mindfulness is becoming a useful skill. And in those moments, you no longer imagine that your suffering is coming from the outside, you’re no longer disposed to merely blame the world, or other people, you recognize, viscerally that that thing that made you angry, or anxious wasn’t the true cause of your suffering. The true cause was internal to your mind. And you can take responsibility for noticing this process. And for relaxing the apparent hold it has on you. And in your meditation practice, you begin to understand that meditation is not about creating a pleasant state that you struggled to hold on to, for 10 minutes, or for an hour. Some people have written to say that I talked too much during the guided meditations. And because I talk so much, they can’t settle into a truly meditative state. All I can say is that if my speaking, disrupts your meditation, you’re not actually doing the practice, he may be doing some other practice. But as a far less interesting one. Real mindfulness is totally compatible with listening to someone speak and understanding their words. In fact, ultimately, whatever state you associate with successful meditation needs to be relinquished.
Because the goal is to recognize how consciousness already is - not to produce some temporary feelings of inner peace. And the truth is people can spend a lot of time in their practice, years and years, not understanding this. So further progress comes in understanding that this practice is not about being calm, or peaceful, merely.

Ultimately, meditation is about recognizing that consciousness is already free of the problem you’re trying to solve in this moment. It’s already open, wide, open, and uncontaminated. It already transcends its content is already free of the feeling of self. This feeling of being separated from experience. This feeling of being a passenger in your own body, stuck up in your head and glimpsing this freedom, again and again, is different than manufacturing some transitory state of peacefulness, or merely reducing your stress. Right glimpsing, the freedom of consciousness is actually compatible with feeling acute stress. Sometimes we need to feel stress, to do creative and productive work. Some stresses are good for you.

So the insight to be gleaned here is something that is just as available in the middle of a hard workout, or when confronting some other challenge, as it is when your eyes are closed, and you feel deeply relaxed. to progress and meditation ultimately entails that we become a less precious and inward About the practice of meditation itself.

The skill we’re cultivating here is the ability to simply leave everything as it is and to recognize the intrinsic freedom that is already present in this moment of consciousness.